Letter of the month

Fire safety in huts

There are white folded fire blankets in most serviced huts, and I’ll bet you’re like us – not noticing them until they’re needed.

So a big thank you to DOC for installing these blankets and having them strategically placed by a kitchen bench or near the door. They work wonders if you start a fire in a hut. They are easy to use and, after drying, to fold and repack for reuse.

Recently, in a hut in Nelson Lakes National Park, an older gas cooker was correctly attached to the cylinder but something faulted and it caught fire. The flame adjustment handle melted, the blaze grew and if it were not for the fire blanket it may not have been extinguished. We were worried that the cylinder would explode with the heat.

Two lessons for us and the others in the hut: 

1. When entering a hut, note where the fire blanket is kept.

2. Consider replacing your gas cooker if it’s old and looking worse for wear. They don’t last forever and a new one is cheaper than rebuilding a hut!

– Pauline Bennett

– Pauline receives an Offgrid Provisions Ultimate Solo Adventure Pack worth $79.99 (featured image) with all the food and drink she needs for an overnight mission, courtesy of www.southernapproach.co.nz. Readers, send your letter to the editor for a chance to win.

You can’t please all of the people all of the time

The letter ‘New frequency’ (January/February 2025) included the comment, ‘Sadly, it seems Wilderness hassomewhat lost the spirit of being in the wilderness and instead now has a focus on walking in urban and accessible areas.’ 

I sympathise with the author’s concerns, but have a different perspective from over the ditch.

In Australia we don’t have a direct counterpart to Wilderness. The closest we have is a good quarterly publication, which I recommend. For your interest, here are the headline articles from the most recent edition:

1. An Australian ascent of Mount Everest

2. Tasmania’s South Coast Track

3. Walking the Kimberley in the wet season

4. Climbing Europe’s 4000m peaks

5. Packrafting the Mitchell River

6. Crossing the Oxley Wild Rivers National Park

7. Sea kayaking in Vancouver Island

8. The Five Passes trek on NZ’s South Island

My point is: none of these is accessible to any but the most experienced hikers.

What is featured in Wilderness is no walk in the park either. I always say that Kiwis don’t know how tough they actually are. What you consider a moderate tramp can be hardcore for everyone else.

The survival of Wilderness as a (nearly) monthly, and its cultural relevance, surely is testament to its success. I became a subscriber because I had already encountered the magazine many times, both physically and in discussions with other trampers. True, there are plenty of articles I skip over, and as an Australian the Walk1200km challenge is not my bag, but there’s a lot that is. And when I want to walk in New Zealand, having access to the online back catalogue is amazing and worth the subscription fee.

I think Wilderness is doing the best it can to steer the tricky path between the needs of many different walkers. We can all flick past the content that isn’t relevant to us, just so we keep getting the stuff that is.

– Andrew Spanner

The people make the tramp

I really enjoyed ‘Oh, the people you meet’ (January/February 2025). Besides the usual articles Wilderness provides that give route beta for more technical, off-track and/or less-travelled trips, I’d love to see one or two pieces like this in each issue: stories about people from all walks of life encountered on the busier tracks, the conversations, what brought them there and what they’re enjoying. 

I enjoy tramping a busier circuit now and then and chatting with trampers and visitors to New Zealand about what they’ve enjoyed and where they’re going.

– Zack Williams

Dystopian creep

My husband and I read the news item ‘Government proposes fees to access conservation areas’ (January/February 2025) with great concern. We are now trying to encourage submissions on the proposal. To this end, I wrote the following poem.

We need funding to protect our special areas and manage overcrowding, DOC says,

As it invites public feedback on plans to charge for access to conservation gems,

This can be done, it says, in one of three ways,

Charge everyone the same, tourists only or tourists more and Kiwis less,

We can’t have our natural areas left a mess,

Yes us Kiwis want to keep our fauna and flora clean and green,

But restricting our access to our great outdoors is an idea most New Zealanders would see as mean,

Yes, it would restrict – imagine an average family footing the bill for petrol plus paying access and car parking fees for just a day trip!

The idea is enough to make me and my family flip!

Of course, DOC says, it would only be 

the very special and popular spots,

Yeah right. This is what it said for hut bookings – recently another 15 huts were added to this system lot,

How would access charging and entry 

be policed, one muses?

One would think policing such a system would result in high costs to catch abusers,

Only the tourists, DOC says, as concerns are voiced, need pay maybe,

But hang on, how will they know who’s a tourist or a Kiwi?

Will gates, fences and scan-in portals be erected?

Will we see more surveillance so those not allowed are detected?

Will expensive rangers or machines 

check IDs or passes?

One wonders just how far this could go 

as the development of technology our wildest nightmare surpasses,

Will drones police the parks to save costs?

Will our freedom to walk into nature be lost?

That’s not the Kiwi way,

The proposed system is not acceptable any day,

I say no. Stop what will inevitably be a slow creep

To a dystopian nightmare which would surely cause us all to weep.

Instead charge tourists a bigger conservation fee upon entry to our beautiful land,

That is the best plan.

– Rachael Parsons